So I was delighted to see a new monograph from the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs on the benefits of “offshore” financial centers. Authored by Diego Zuluaga, it explains why low-tax jurisdictions are good news for those of us laboring in less-enlightened places.

Offshore finance serves several purposes, the most salient of which is the efficient allocation of capital. Some of this activity is tax-related, aimed at raising after-tax investment returns. If it were not for offshore jurisdictions, much foreign investment would be vulnerable to double or triple taxation. Because, under such punitive rates of tax, some of this investment would not take place, the existence of offshore centres has real positive effects on economic activity alongside the (plausibly) negative impact on the tax revenue of individual countries. These welfare gains have been amply documented… Beyond their impact on aggregate investment, research shows that the existence of an OFC is associated with better economic outcomes in neighbouring countries. Contrary to the popular narrative, these jurisdictions are well-governed and peaceful. Who, after all, would wish to use intermediaries in places where investors were regularly expropriated or harassed? …It is difficult to imagine the process of globalisation that has taken place over the last fifty years, bringing hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, happening without the robust financial and legal framework which offshore jurisdictions provide for investment. It would be counterproductive, for both the developing and the rich world, to undermine their essential functions. …Clamping down on offshore centres…would make societies less productive and prosperous, and this effect would compound over time.

He provides some fiscal history, including the fact that government used to be very small in the industrialized world (indeed, that’s one of the big reasons why today’s rich nations got that way).

And he notes that low-tax jurisdictions became more important to global commerce as governments adopted dirigiste policies.

Before World War I, governments played only a small role in economic activity, rarely taking up shares of national income in excess of 15 per cent during peacetime. After the Great War, they took upon themselves ever larger fiscal and administrative functions, notably trade restrictions and capital controls. …In a context of punitive marginal tax rates, constrained capital movements…, OFCs were vital to the revival of cross-border trade and investment after World War II. Without stable intermediary jurisdictions with robust rule of law and low taxation, much international investment would have been too costly, whether because of the associated tax burden or the risks of expropriation and inflation.

Zuluaga notes that tax competition ties the hands of politicians.

Theory and evidence suggest that countries may have any two of free capital mobility, an independent tax policy and no tax competition (Figure 2). But they cannot have all three.

And here is the aforementioned Figure 2 from the report.

I wrote about a version of the tax trilemma two years ago and noted that there’s only a problem if a country has high taxes.

So I made the following correction.

Returning to the article, Zuluaga points out that low-tax jurisdictions have a much better track record in the fight against bad behavior than high-tax nations.

OFCs are neither the original source nor the ultimate destination of illegal financial flows. So long as there remain corrupt politicians, drug users and people willing to engage in terrorist acts, history suggests that some illegal financial activity will take place to make it possible. Furthermore, as we saw above, OFCs are as a rule far more compliant and transparent in their prevention of unlawful activities than onshore jurisdictions, including the United States and the United Kingdom.

Zuluaga concludes with a warning about how the attack on tax havens is really an attack on globalization. And the global economy will suffer if the statists prevail.

…an ominous alliance of revenue-greedy politicians, ideological campaigners and rent-seekers has emerged in recent years. Gradually, but relentlessly, they aim to dismantle the liberal financial order of which free capital movement is a fundamental component. …the alliance’s real goal: to eliminate tax competition and constrain the movement of capital in order to bring it under their control. The consequences of this effort would be long-standing and go far beyond a few tiny offshore financial centres.

Though I’m not sure Zuluaga and I agree on everything. His article notes, seemingly with approval, that offshore jurisdictions largely have agreed to help enforce the bad tax laws of onshore nations. Yet that’s a recipe for the application of more double taxation on income that is saved and invested, which he acknowledges is a bad thing.

In other words, I think financial privacy is a good thing since predatory governments are less likely to misbehave if they know taxpayers have safe (and confidential) places to put their money. Now that privacy has been weakened, however, anti-tax competition folks at the OECD are openly chortling that there can be higher taxes on capital.

The bottom line is that tax competition without privacy is not very effective. I wonder if Zuluaga understands and agrees.

Although the country of residence may theoretically impose taxes on foreign income, it can only do so practically if its tax authorities have knowledge of that income. It is therefore common for tax havens to have strong privacy laws that protect investors’ personal information from enquirers (including foreign tax authorities). The best-known of these was Switzerland, which introduced banking secrecy to protect Jewish customers from Nazi confiscation, and there remains a genuine strong feeling in many of these countries that privacy is about more than just tax avoidance.

But I’m digressing. Since we’ve looked at one U.K.-based defense of low-tax jurisdictions, let’s also look at some excerpts from a column by Matthew Lynn in the London-based Spectator.

He makes a very interesting point about how so-called tax havens are basically the financial equivalent of free zones for goods.

…in a globalised economy, offshore finance plays an important role, enabling money to move across borders relatively easily. Rather oddly, a lot of the media seem to have decided that while it is fine for people and goods to move around the world, having a bank account or an investment in a different country makes you virtually a criminal. …The world already has an extensive network of free ports, tax-free zones where goods in transit can be processed or temporarily stored without having to pay local tariffs. There are an estimated 3,500 of them across 135 countries, facilitating the movement of goods around the world. They have helped trade grow hugely over the past couple of decades. Offshore centres…are now mainly financial ‘free ports’ — places where cash can easily be parked and transferred as it moves around the world.

He also makes a very important observation about how the theft of data leading to the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers revealed very little illegal behavior.

…one of the interesting things about the leaks is not how much wrongdoing they expose, but how little. Take last year’s Panama Papers scandal, for example. …For all the drama, it was pretty small beer. The reason? All the data revealed might have been interesting, and made for some lurid headlines, but very few people turned out to be breaking any laws. In only a handful of cases were taxes being evaded or money-laundered.

…it turns out that offshore centres are used by just about everyone. Most pension funds use them, including those looking after the savings of the politicians queuing up to condemn them. They are part of the infrastructure of globalisation, as much as the container ships, airports and fibre optic cables. It is ironic that many of the same people who proudly describe themselves as citizens of the world think that applies to everything except money.

Two best friends in the Republic of Ireland who have decided to get married to avoid paying inheritance tax… Michael O’Sullivan, a father of three, is set to marry his friend Matt Murphy in January. …Friends for almost 30 years they have made the decision so that Michael will inherit Matt’s home in Stoneybatter, Dublin when he dies. …Neither man is gay and say they are like brothers.

Not only will this save them money, it will be beneficial for other taxpayers as well.

Both men say they are currently on a small pension and say their idea is “saving the State money”. Michael said: “We found out from a friend of mine that she is paying €1,760 a week to stay in a nursing home, okay I could put Matt in a nursing home and then people would be paying their tax to look after him in the nursing home. “I don’t have much money and Matt can’t pay me to look after him but we tried to find out how much it would cost for a 24-hour care, you’re talking about a couple of thousand a week. “We are saving the State money.”

By the way, this story also may be an indirect example of excessive regulation.

It seems the guys could have received a subsidy from the government so that Michael could take care of Matt, but that would have triggered so much hassle and red tape that it wasn’t worth it.

“We didn’t go for the Carer’s Allowance because Matt would have to be examined, the house would have to be looked at.

Amen. Nobody welcomes a bunch of nosy bureaucrats poking through their life.

Now let’s zoom out and consider some broader policy implications.

I like and defend Ireland’s policy of aggressively using low corporate taxes to attract jobs and investment, but that doesn’t mean other policies in the country are favorable for taxpayers.

So I can’t resist commenting on a Washington Poststory about the tax implications of the upcoming wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

It may seem like a modern fairy tale, but the upcoming wedding of Britain’s Prince Harry to American actress Meghan Markle will come with some mundane hurdles. Perhaps most inconveniently for the British royals, this transatlantic partnership could end up involving the United States’ Internal Revenue Service.

Most readers probably wonder how and why the IRS will be involved. After all, Ms. Markle no longer will be living in the United States or earning income in the United States after she marries the Prince.

But here’s the bad news (for the millions of Americans who live overseas, not just Ms. Markle): The United States imposes “worldwide taxation,” which means the IRS claims the right to tax all income earned by citizens, even if those citizens live overseas and earn all their income outside of America.

…there already has been widespread speculation that the union of Prince Harry and Markle eventually could result in some British royal children wielding American passports. But there’s a big obstacle in the way: American tax laws. …The United States’ citizenship-based taxation system is unusual: Only Eritrea has a similar system. It’s a relic of the Civil War and the Revenue Act of 1862, which called for the taxing of U.S. citizens abroad.

Here’s what this means for the royal family.

Markle’s American citizenship could open up the secretive finances of the royal family to outside scrutiny. If she remains a U.S. citizen, Markle will have to file her taxes to the IRS every year. And if she has more than $300,000 in assets at any point during the tax year — a likely scenario, given her successful acting career and her future husband — she will be expected to annually file a document called Form 8938 that will reveal the detail of these assets, which could include foreign trusts. …Although Markle’s tax information would not become public once sent to the United States, it would leave the royal family open not only to IRS review but also the risk that the information could leak, said Dianne Mehany, a tax lawyer at Caplin & Drysdale.

So what’s the solution if the royal family wants to avoid the greedy and intrusive IRS?

…the royal family employs some of the country’s best tax consultants. …”My guess is that she’ll be pressured by the Royal family to renounce [her U.S. citizenship], even if she’d rather not,” Spiro added. In many ways, that solution may be the simplest. And if Markle does give up her citizenship, she won’t be alone. Treasury Department data show that 5,411 people chose to expatriate in 2016 — a 26 percent year-over-year increase and potentially a historic high — and experts expect that number to keep rising because of the increasing tax burdens placed on U.S. citizens living abroad.

And it’s embarrassing to acknowledge that the United States has a very barbaric practice (used by evil regimes such as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia) of extorting funds from Americas who are forced to give up citizenship.

She…would be subject to a potentially considerable exit tax.

This is adding injury to injury.

But Ms. Markle can be comforted by the fact that she’s not an outlier. Because of America’s bad worldwide tax regime (and especially because of FATCA, which makes enforcement of that bad system especially painful), an ever-growing number of overseas Americans have been forced to give up their citizenship.

Maybe as a wedding present to Prince Harry, American politicians can junk America’s terrible worldwide tax regime. That doesn’t require dramatic change, but why not fix a bunch of problems at once? I’ll simply point out that the flat tax is based on the common-sense approach of territorial taxation (governments only tax economic activity inside national borders).

Unfortunately, the GOP isn’t planning to completely fix these policies, largely because there’s no commitment to control government spending. But any shift toward better tax policy will be good for the nation.

Another goal to add to the above list is that Republicans want to create a level playing field for American-based firms by replacing “worldwide taxation” of business income with “territorial taxation” of business income.

For those who have wisely avoided the topic of international business taxation, here’s all you need to know: Worldwide taxation means a company that earns income in another country is taxed both by the government where the income is earned and by the government back home. Territorial taxation, by contrast, is simply the common-sense notion that income is taxed only by the government where the income is earned.

In a column for the Wall Street Journal, two authors explain how America’s anti-competitive system of worldwide taxation undermines U.S.-domiciled companies.

…earlier this month Iconix , the U.S.-based company that owns the rights to Charles Schulz’s comic characters, announced it will sell them to Canada’s DHX Media. That makes Charlie Brown America’s latest expatriate. It’s a clear signal that U.S. corporate taxes are nudging business elsewhere. …why? In part because the U.S. corporate tax system hampers U.S.-based businesses by subjecting them to world-wide taxation. Canada’s aggregate corporate taxes are about 10 percentage points lower. …America’s high corporate tax rate and its practice of taxing international income is out of step with the rest of the world. The solution is so clear even a cartoon character should grasp it: Cut tax rates and adopt a system for taxing international income that more closely resembles those used by the country’s international competitors.

Simply stated, American-domiciled multinationals have a big competitive disadvantage compared to their foreign rivals. So it’s understandable that many of them try to protect shareholders, workers, and consumers by arranging (usually through a merger) to become foreign companies.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that the Republican tax reform plan ostensibly will shift America to a territorial tax system. As explained above, this is the sensible notion of letting other nations tax income earned inside their borders while the IRS would tax the income earned by companies in the United States.

This would be good for competitiveness, particularly since the United States is one of only a handful of nations that impose a worldwide tax burden on domestic firms.

But not everybody likes the idea of territorial taxation.

One reason for opposition is that some people see corporations primarily as sources of tax revenue. So when there are discussions of international tax, their mindset is nations should compete on grabbing the most money. I’m not joking.

European Union regulators’ tax crackdown on Amazon.com Inc. — like the EU’s case against Apple Inc. — should spur U.S. policy makers to address companies’ aggressive offshore tax-avoidance strategies before it’s too late, experts said. …“Really, what we are seeing is a race by the different taxing jurisdictions to claim a share of the tax prize represented by the largely untaxed streams of income that U.S. multinationals have engineered for themselves,’’ said Ed Kleinbard, a professor at the University of Southern California and the former chief of staff for Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation. “If the United States doesn’t join the race, it will just lose tax revenue to more aggressive host countries around the world.’’ The EU rulings “do make it clear that if we are not interested in protecting our corporate tax base, other countries will be more than happy to tax the income,’’ said Kimberly Clausing, a professor of economics at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

Call me crazy, but I think American policymakers should be in a race to create jobs, boost investment, and increase wages. And that means doing the opposite of what these supposed experts want.

Unsurprisingly, left-wing groups also are opposed to territorial taxation. Here are some passages from a report published by the Hill.

One hundred organizations, including a number of progressive groups and labor unions, are urging Congress to reject a major international tax change proposed in Republicans’ framework for a tax overhaul. In a letter dated Monday, the groups speak out against the framework’s move toward a “territorial” tax system that would largely exempt American companies’ foreign profits from U.S. tax. …”Ending taxation of offshore profits would give multinational corporations an incentive to send jobs offshore, thereby lowering U.S. wages,” they wrote.

Both assertions in that excerpt are wrong and/or misleading.

First, territorial taxation doesn’t mean that profits are exempt from tax. It simply means that the IRS doesn’t impose an additional layer of tax on income that already has been subject to the tax system of another country.

Worldwide taxation is not the way to fix that bias since foreign-domiciled companies wouldn’t be impacted and they easily can sell into the American market.

By the way, the Republican tax plan doesn’t even create a real territorial tax system. Returning to the Bloomberg story cited above, the GOP proposal basically copies a very bad idea that was being pushed a few years ago by the Obama Administration.

To be fair, the Republican approach is less punitive that what Obama wanted.

Nonetheless, I worry that if Republicans adopt some sort of global minimum tax, it will just be a matter of time before that rate increases. In which case a shift toward territoriality actually plants a seed for a more onerous worldwide system!

Without knowing what will happen in the future, there’s no right or wrong answer, but I’m wondering whether the smart approach is to simply leave the current system in place. Yet, it’s based on worldwide taxation, but at least companies have deferral, which creates de facto territoriality for firms that manage their affairs astutely.

Why do many people engage in civil disobedience and decide not to comply with tax laws?

Our leftist friends (the ones who think that they’re compassionate because they want to spend other people’s money) assert that those who don’t obey the revenue demands of government are greedy tax evaders who don’t care about society.

Will this approach work? Are they right that governments should be more aggressive to obtain more obedience?

To answer questions of how to best deal with tax evasion, we should keep in mind three broad issues about the enforcement of any type of law:

1. Presumably there should be some sort of cost-benefit analysis. We don’t assign every person a cop, after all, even though that presumably would reduce crime. Simply stated, it wouldn’t be worth the cost.

2. We also understand that crime reduction isn’t the only thing that matters. We grant people basic constitutional rights, for instance, even though that frequently makes is more difficult to get convictions.

3. And what if laws are unjust, even to the point of leading citizens to engage in jury nullification? Does our legal system lose moral legitimacy when it is more lenient to those convicted of child pornography than it is to folks guilty of forgetting to file paperwork?

4. Is it appropriate to track down every penny, even if it results in absurdities such as the German government spending 800,000 euros to track down 25,000 euros of unpaid taxes on coffee beans ordered online?

5. Or what about the draconian FATCA law imposed by the United States government, which is only projected to raise $870 million per year, but will impose several times as much cost on taxpayers, drive investment out of American, and also causing significant anti-US resentment around the world?

6. And is there perhaps a good way of encouraging compliance?

The purpose of today’s (lengthy) column is to answer the final question.

More specifically, the right way to reduce tax evasion is to have a reasonable and non-punitive tax code that finances a modest-sized, non-corrupt government. This make tax compliance more likely and more just.

I don’t blame people from France for evading confiscatory taxation. I don’t blame people in corrupt nations such as Mexico for evading taxation. I don’t blame people in dictatorial nations such as Venezuela for evading taxation. But I would criticize people in Singapore,Switzerland, Hong Kong, or Estonia for dodging their tax liabilities. They are fortunate to live in nations with reasonable tax rates, low levels of corruption, and good rule of law.

Let’s elaborate on this issue.

And we’ll start by citing the world’s leading expert, Friedrich Schneider, who made these important points about low tax rates in an article for the International Monetary Fund.

…the major driving forces behind the size and growth of the shadow economy are an increasing burden of tax and social security payments… Several studies have found strong evidence that the tax regime influences the shadow economy. …In the United States, analysis shows that as the marginal federal personal income tax rate increases by one percentage point, other things being equal, the shadow economy grows by 1.4 percentage points.

With this bit of background, let’s look at the magnitude of non-compliance.

The Wall Street Journalreports on the history of dodging greedy governments.

Tax evasion has been around since ancient Mesopotamia, when the Sumerians were cheerfully working the black market. …The Romans were the most efficient tax collectors of all. Unfortunately Emperor Nero (ruling from A.D. 54 to 68) abandoned the high growth, low-tax policies of his predecessors. In their place he created a downward spiral of inflationary measures coupled with excessive taxation. By the third century, widespread tax evasion forced economically stressed Rome to practice expropriation. …Six hundred years later, during the Heian period (794-1185), Japan’s aristocracy acted in a similar manner and with similar consequences. …China’s Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) waged a harsh war against the tax-dodging gentry.

These same fights between governments and taxpayers exist today.

In a column published by the New York Times, we got some first-hand knowledge of the extraordinary steps people take to protect themselves from taxation in China.

In China, businesses have to give out invoices called fapiao to ensure that taxes are being paid. But the fapiao — the very mechanism intended to keep businesses honest — is sometimes the key to cheating on taxes. …My company would disguise my salary as a series of expenses, which would also save me from paying personal income tax. But to show proof of expenses, the accountant needed fapiao. It was my responsibility to collect the invoices. …But evading taxes in China was harder than I expected because everyone else was trying to evade taxes, too. …Though businesses are obligated to give out fapiao, many do not unless customers pester them. They are trying to minimize the paper trail so they too can avoid paying taxes on their true income. …some people are driven to buy fake invoices. It’s not hard; scalpers will sell them on the street, and companies that specialize in printing fake fapiao proliferate.

The author had mixed feelings about the experience.

I couldn’t figure out whether what I was doing was right or wrong. By demanding a fapiao, I was forcing some businesses to pay taxes they would otherwise evade. But all of this was in the service of helping my own company evade taxes. In this strange tale, I was both hero and villain. To me, tax evasion seemed intractable. Like a blown-up balloon, if you push in one part, another swells.

Meanwhile, Leonid Bershidsky, writing for Bloomberg, reviews what people do to escape the grasping hand of government in Greece.

In gross domestic product terms, Greece has the second biggest shadow economy among European Union countries without a Communist past…unreported revenue accounts for 23.3 percent of GDP, or $55.3 billion. …Had it been subject to taxes — at the prevailing 40 percent rate — the shadow economy would have contributed $22 billion to the government’s coffers.

Bershidsky cites some new academic research.

…researchers used loan application data from a big Greek bank. …The bank…regards the reported income figure as a fiction, as do many other banks in eastern and southern Europe. As a result, it uses estimates of “soft” — untaxed — income for its risk-scoring model. Artavanis, Tsoutsoura and Morse recreated these estimates and concluded that the true income of self-employed workers in Greece is 75 percent to 84 percent higher than the reported one.

Greek politician have tried to get more money from the shadow economy but haven’t been very successful.

Even the leftist government of former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, which came up with unworkable schemes to crack down on tax evasion — from using housewives and tourists to inform on small businesses to a levy on cash withdrawals — failed.

Bershidsky notes that some have called for indirect forms of taxation that are harder to evade.

The researchers suggest the government should sell occupation licenses through the powerful professional associations: a harsh but effective way to collect more money.

Though his conclusion rubs me the wrong way.

The shadow economy — and particularly the contributions of professionals — is an enormous potential resource for governments.

At the risk of editorializing, I would say that the untaxed money is “money politicians would like to use to buy votes” rather than calling it “an enormous potential resource.” Which is a point Bershidsky should understand since he wrote back in 2014 that European governments have spent themselves into a fiscal ditch.

Now let’s shift to the academic world. What do scholars have to say about tax compliance?

Two economists from the University of Rome have authored a study examining the role of fiscal policy on the underground economy and economic performance. They start by observing that ever-higher taxes are crippling economic performance in Europe.

…most European economies have been experiencing feeble growth and increasing levels of public debt. Compliance with the Stability and Growth Pact, and in particular with the primary deficit clause, has required many governments to raise taxes to exceptional high levels, thus hindering business venture and economic recovery.

And those high tax burdens don’t collect nearly as much money as politicians want because taxpayers have greater incentives to dodge the tax collectors.

…between a country’s tax system and the size of its shadow economy is a two-way relationship. …there exists a positive relationship between the dimension of the tax burden on economic activity and the size of the informal economy. …various tax reform scenarios, recently advocated in economic and policy circles as a means to promote growth, such as…ex-ante budget-neutral tax shifts involving reductions of distortionary taxes on labor and business compensated by an increase in the consumption tax or counterbalanced by decreases of government spending. We will see that all these fiscal reforms give rise to a resource reallocation effect from underground to official production or vice versa and have rather different implications in terms of output, fiscal solvency and welfare.

The authors look at the Italian evidence and find that lower tax rates would create a win-win situation.

Our main results can be summarized as follows. …the dimension of the underground sector is substantially decreased by fiscal interventions envisaging sizeable labor tax wedge reductions. Finally, all the considered tax reforms have positive effects on the fiscal consolidation process due to a combination of larger tax revenues and positive output growth. …consider the case in which the decrease of the business tax is met by a public spending cut…an expansionary effect on output, consumption and investments, and, despite the overall reduction of tax revenues, the public-debt-to-output ratio falls. However, we notice that the expansionary effects are…magnified on consumption and investments. In this model, in fact, public spending is a pure waste that crowds out the private component of aggregate demand, therefore it comes as no surprise that a tax cut on business, counterbalanced by a public spending reduction, is highly beneficial for both consumption and investments. …the underground sector shrinks.

The benefits of lower tax rates are especially significant if paired with reductions in the burden of government spending.

When the reduction of the business tax, personal income tax, and employers’ SSC tax rates are financed through a cut in public spending…we observe positive welfare effects… The main difference…is that consumption is significantly higher…due to the fact that this reform leaves the consumption tax unchanged, while public spending is a pure waste that crowds out private consumption. …all the policy changes that lower the labor tax wedge permanently reduce the dimension of the underground sector. Finally, all the considered tax reforms positively contribute to the fiscal consolidation process.

They look at factors that lead to higher or lower levels of compliance.

…a high quality of the services provided by the State, and a fair treatment of taxpayers increase tax morale. More generally, a high level of trust in legal and political institutions has a positive effect on tax morale. …two further institutional characteristics that are likely to negatively affect an individual’s tax morale: corruption and complexity of the tax system.

By the way, “tax morale” is a rough measure of whether taxpayers willingly obey based on their perceptions of factors such as tax fairness and waste and corruption in government.

And that measure of morale naturally varies across countries.

…we examine how people from different countries react to varying tax rates and levels of efficiency. …We focus our analysis on three countries: Italy, Sweden and UK. …these three countries show differences concerning the two institutional characteristics we are focused on. Italy and Sweden show a high tax burden while UK shows a low one. Whereas, Sweden and UK can be considered efficient states, Italy is not.

But everything is relative, I guess, and the U.K. is probably efficient compared to Italy.

Anyhow, here are the results of the study.

Experimental subjects react to institution incentives, no matter the country. More specifically, tax compliance increases as efficiency increases and decreases as the tax rate increases. However, although people’s reaction to changes in efficiency is homogeneous across countries, subjects from different countries react with a different degree to an increase in the tax rate. In particular, participants who live in Italy or Sweden – countries where the tax burden is usually high – react more strongly to an increase in the tax rate than our British subjects. At the same time, subjects in Sweden – where the efficiency of the public service is high – react less to tax rate increases than Italian subjects.

So low tax rates matter, but competent and frugal government also is part of the story.

In all 3 countries, higher tax rates imply lower compliance. This is in line with experimental evidence: as Alm (2012, p. 66) affirms: “most (but not all) experimental studies have found that a higher tax rate leads to less compliance” and “The presence of a public good financed by voluntary tax payments has been found to increase subject tax compliance”. …The stronger negative reaction of Italian subjects to an increase in the tax rate may be due to the fact that in everyday life they suffer from high tax rates combined with inefficiency and corruption. …In fact, in the final questionnaire, 67.5% of Italian participants state that people would be more likely to pay taxes if the government were more efficient (vs 34.4% and 30.3% in UK and Sweden respectively) and 54.6% would comply with their fiscal obligations if they had some control over how tax money were spent (vs 30.8% and 25.8% in UK and Sweden respectively)… No way to impose a high tax burden on citizens if the tax revenue is wasted through inefficiency and corruption.

Here’s one additional academic study from Columbia University. The author recognizes the role of tax rates in discouraging compliance, but focuses on the impact of tax complexity.

Here’s what he wrote about the underlying theory of tax compliance.

The basic theoretical framework for tax evasion was derived…from the Becker model of crime. This approach views tax evasion as a gamble. …when tax evasion is successful, the taxpayer gains by not paying taxes. In other cases, tax evasion is uncovered by tax authorities, and the taxpayer has to pay taxes due and fines. The taxpayer compares the expected gain to the expected loss. …This approach highlights a number of factors that determine whether and to what extent taxes are evaded. These are: the magnitude of potential savings (which, on the margin, is simply equal to the tax rate)… This model therefore highlights…natural policy parameters that can affect evasion. …the marginal gains from tax evasion could be reduced by imposing lower marginal tax rates.

Interestingly, he doesn’t see much difference between (illegal) evasion and (legal) avoidance.

The ideal compliance policy should target both tax avoidance and tax evasion. While there is a legal distinction between the two, from the economic point of view the difference is less explicit. Both types of activity involve a loss of revenue and both involve a loss of economic welfare.

He then brings tax complexity into the equation.

…the appropriate extent of tax enforcement critically depends on the underlying tax structure. In particular, the role of complexity in the tax system as a factor influencing the size of the tax gap, as well as legal but undesirable tax avoidance, are highlighted. Two principal implications of tax complexity are stressed here. First, complexity permits additional ways to shield income from tax and, consequently, complexity increases the overall cost of taxation. … Reasonable simplification can more adequately combat tax evasion and avoidance than traditional enforcement measures.

Here are some of his findings.

Tax avoidance is a function of ambiguity in the tax system. …Administrative investment in enforcement becomes more important when the tax system is more distortionary. One way to reduce the need for costly tax enforcement is to reduce distortions. … Higher complexity induces tax avoidance and other types of substitution responses. A tax system that allows for many different types of avoidance responses is likely to cause stronger behavioral effects and therefore higher excess burden. …Shutting down extra margins of response can be loosely summarized as expanding the tax base by eliminating preferential treatment of some types of income, deductions, and exemptions. …One of the consequences of complexity is that it makes it difficult for honest taxpayers to fulfill their obligations. …The bottom line is that complexity makes relying on penalties a much less appealing approach to enforcement. …From the complexity point of view, itemized deductions add a multitude of tax avoidance and evasion opportunities. …They stimulate avoidance by introducing extra margins with differential tax treatment.

…tax avoidance—letting well enough alone—may be a simple and practical way of addressing shortcomings of an inefficient tax structure. For example, suppose that, as much of the optimal taxation literature suggests, capital incomes should not be taxed, or should only be taxed lightly. In that case, the best policy response would be cutting tax rates imposed on capital income. If it is not politically feasible to pursue such policies explicitly, a similar outcome can be accomplished by reducing enforcement or increasing avoidance opportunities in this area. …The preferred way of dealing with compliance problems is fixing the tax code.

Amen. Many types of tax evasion only exist because the politicians in Washington have saddled us with bad tax policy.

And when tax policy moves in the right direction, compliance improves. Consider what happened in the 1980s when Reagan’s reforms lowered the top tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent. Rich people paid five times as much to the IRS, in large part because they declared 10 times as much income.

But it’s very unlikely that they actually earned 10 times as much income. Some non-trivial portion of that gain was because of less evasion and less avoidance.

Simply stated, it makes sense to comply with the tax system when rates are low.

This agenda, if ultimately successful, will cripple tax competition as a liberalizing force in the global economy.

This would be very unfortunate. Tax rates have fallen in recent decades, for instance, largely because governments have felt pressure to compete for jobs and investment.

That has led to tax systems that are less punitive. And politicians really can’t complain about being pressured to lower tax rates since these reforms generally led to more growth, which generated significant revenue feedback. In other words, the Laffer Curve works.

This helps to explain why politicians from high-tax governments want to eviscerate tax competition and create some sort of global tax cartel. An “OPEC for politicians” would give them more leeway to impose class-warfare tax policy and buy votes.

The rhetoric they’ll use will be about reducing tax evasion. The real goal will be bigger government.

I’m not joking. Left-wing international bureaucracies such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have justified their anti-tax competition efforts by asserting that jurisdictional rivalry “may hamper the application of progressive tax rates and the achievement of redistributive goals.”

I suppose we should give them credit for being honest about their ideological agenda. But for those who want good tax policy (and who also understand why that’s the right way to boost tax compliance), it’s particularly galling that the OECD is being financed with American tax dollars to push in the other direction.

A major U.S. company merges with a foreign firm in part to avoid America’s punishing corporate tax code, and the politicians who refuse to reform the code denounce the company for trying to stay competitive. …Sigh. …Let’s try to explain one more time why it makes perfect business—and moral—sense… The U.S. federal corporate income tax rate is 35%. The Irish rate is 12.5%. …A CEO obliged to act in the best interests of shareholders cannot ignore this competitive reality.

But what do Sanders and Clinton think? Well, the editorial skewers the two leading Democratic candidates for their vacuous demagoguery.

…none of this business logic impressesHillary ClintonorBernie Sanders,who helped to write the U.S. tax code as Senators but are now competing as presidential candidates to see who can demagogue more ferociously against American employers. …Neither one wants to reform the tax code to make U.S. tax rates more competitive with the rest of the world. Instead they want to raise the costs of doing business even further. Mrs. Clinton’s solution is to raise taxes on investors with higher capital-gains taxes, block inversion deals, and apply an “exit tax” to businesses that manage to escape. Mr. Sanders would go further and perform an immediate $620 billion cashectomy on U.S. companies. The Vermonter would tax the money U.S. firms have earned overseas, even though that income has already been taxed in foreign jurisdictions.

Call me crazy, but I don’t think the ideas being peddled by Clinton and Sanders will lead to more and better jobs in the United States.

Which is why, when given the chance to write about this topic for Fortune, I suggested that it would be best to actually fix the tax code rather than blaming the victim.

Some U.S. politicians respond to these mergers with demagoguery about “economic treason,” but that’s silly. These corporate unions are basically the business version of a couple in a long-distance relationship that decides to live where the economic outlook is brighter after getting married. So instead of blaming the victims, the folks in Washington should do what’s right for the country by trying to deal with the warts that make America’s tax system so unappealing for multinational firms.

With a 35% levy from Washington, augmented by smaller state corporate taxes, the combined burden is more than 39%. In Europe, by contrast, the average corporate tax rate has now dropped below 24%. And the average corporate rate for Asia’s major economies is even lower.

…the IRS also imposes tax on income earned in other nations. Very few nations impose a system of “worldwide taxation,” mostly for the simple reason that the income already is subject to tax in the nations where it is earned.

So here’s the bottom line.

The combination of a high rate and worldwide taxation is like a one-two punch against the competitiveness of U.S.-domiciled firms, so it’s easy to understand why inversions are so attractive. They’re a very simple step to protect the interests of workers, consumers and shareholders. …Let’s hope politicians put aside class warfare and anti-business demagoguery and fix the tax system before it’s too late.

By the way, even a columnist for the New York Times agrees with me. He has a piece on the inversion issue that is not very favorable to companies, and it certainly reads like he’s in favor of governments having more money, but he can’t help but come to the right conclusion.

Ultimately, the only way inversions will stop is when the corporate tax code changes so it becomes more attractive for American companies to be American companies.

And I can’t resist closing with a great blurb from George Will’s most recent column.

Having already paid taxes on it where it was earned, the corporations sensibly resist having it taxed again by the United States’ corporate tax, the highest in the industrial world.

P.S. I’ve made the serious point that Sanders isn’t really a socialist, at least based on his voting record and what he proposes today. Instead, he’s just a conventional statist with mainstream (among leftists) views about redistribution.

Yet because he calls himself a socialist, that leads to amusing moments when other Democrats are asked to identify how he’s different. I’ve already mocked Debbie Wasserman Schultz for her inability to answer that question.

Now let’s see Hillary Clinton dance and dodge. The parts worth watching are all in the first half of the video.

Too bad Chris Matthews didn’t actually press her to answer the question. Though I’m vaguely impressed that she actually knows there are such a thing as libertarians.

P.P.S. While Hillary is clueless, there’s another Clinton that actually has some semi-sensible views about corporate taxation.

One example of the organization’s perfidy is the OECD’s so-called Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) initiative, which is basically a scheme to extract more money from companies (which means, of course, that the real cost is borne by workers, consumers, and shareholders).

I’ve written (severaltimes) about the big-picture implications of this plan, but let’s focus today on some very troubling specifics of BEPS.

Doug Holtz-Eakin, in a column for the Wall Street Journal, explains why we should be very worried about a seemingly arcane development in BEPS’ tax treatment of multinationals. He starts with a very important analogy.

Suppose a group of friends agree to organize a new football league. It would make sense for them to write rules governing the gameplay, the finances of the league, and the process for drafting and trading players. But what about a rule that requires each team to hand over its playbook to the league? No team would want to do that. The playbook is a crucial internal-strategy document, laying out how the team intends to compete. Yet this is what the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development wants: to force successful global companies, including U.S. multinationals, to hand over their “playbooks” to foreign governments.

Here’s specifically what’s troubling about BEPS.

…beginning next year the BEPS rules require U.S.-headquartered companies that have foreign subsidiaries to maintain a “master file” that provides an overview of the company’s business, the global allocation of its activities and income, and its overall transfer pricing policies—a complete picture of its global operations, profit drivers, supply chains, intangibles and financing. In effect, the master file is a U.S. multinational’s playbook.

And, notwithstanding assurances from politicians and bureaucrats, the means that sensitive and proprietary information about U.S. firms will wind up in the wrong hands.

Nothing could be more valuable to a U.S. company’s competitors than the information in its master file. But the master file isn’t subject to any confidentiality safeguards beyond those a foreign government decides to provide. A foreign government could hand the information over to any competitor or use it to develop a new one. And the file could be hacked.

Doug recommends in his column that Congress take steps to protect American companies and Andy Quinlan of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity has the same perspective.

It is…time for Congress to take a more assertive role in the ongoing efforts to rewrite global tax rules. …(BEPS) proposals drafted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development…threaten the competitiveness of U.S.-based companies and the overall American economy. …We know the Paris-based OECD’s aim is to raid businesses – in particular American businesses – for more tax revenue… The fishing expeditions are being undertaken in part so that bureaucrats can later devise new and creative ways to suck even more wealth out of the private sector. …American companies forced to hand proprietary data to governments – like China’s – that are known to engage in corporate espionage and advantage their state-owned enterprises will be forced to choose between forgoing participation to vital markets or allowing competitors easy access to the knowledge and techniques which fuel their success.

You would think that the business community would be very alarmed about BEPS. And many companies are increasingly worried.

But their involvement may be a too-little-too-late story. That’s because the business group that is supposed to monitor the OECD hasn’t done a good job.

The Business and Industry Advisory Committee…has been successfully co-opted by the OECD bureaucracy. At every stage in the process, those positioned to speak on behalf of the business community told any who wished to push back against the boneheaded premise of the OECD’s work to sit down, be quiet, and let them seek to placate hungry tax collectors with soothing words of reassurance about their noble intentions and polite requests for minor accommodations. That go-along-to-get-along strategy has proven a monumental failure. Much of the blame rests with BIAC’s chair, Will Morris. Also the top tax official at General Electric – whose CEO Jeffrey Immelt served as Obama’s “job czar” and is a dependable administration ally – and a former IRS and Treasury Department official, Morris is exactly the kind of business representative tax collectors love.

In any event, I’m sure the bureaucrats at the OECD are happy that BIAC didn’t cause any problems, so GE probably did earn some brownie points.

And what about the companies that don’t feed at the public trough? Weren’t they poorly served by BIAC’s ineffectiveness?

Yes, but the cronyists at GE presumably don’t care.

But enough speculation about why BIAC failed to represent the business community. Let’s return to analysis of BEPS.

Jason Fichtner and Adam Michel of the Mercatus Center explain for U.S. News & World Report that the OECD is pushing for one-size-fits-all global tax rules.

The OECD proposal aims to centralize global tax rules and increase effective tax rates on international firms. U.S. technology firms such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple will likely be harmed the most. …the OECD as a special interest group for tax collectors. Over the past 25 years, they have built an international tax cartel in an effort to keep global tax rates artificially high. The group persistently advocates for increased revenue collection and more centralized control. The OECD has waged a two-decade campaign against low tax rates by blacklisting sovereign countries that don’t comply with OECD directives.

Like the others, Fichtner and Michel worry about the negative consequences of the BEPS plan.

The centralization of tax information through a new international country-by-country reporting requirement will pressure some countries to artificially expand their tax base. A country such as China could increase tax revenue by altering its definition of so-called value creation… Revenue-hungry states will be able to disproportionately extract tax revenue from global companies using the newly centralized tax information. …while a World Bank working paper suggests there is a significant threat to privacy and trade secrets. Country-by-country reporting will complicate international taxation and harm the global economy.

…the United States should focus on fixing our domestic corporate tax code and lower the corporate tax rate. The U.S. [has] the single highest combined corporate tax rate in the OECD. …Lower tax rates will reduce incentives for U.S. businesses to shift assets overseas, grow the economy and increase investment, output and real wages. Lowering tax rates is the most effective way policymakers can encourage innovation and growth. The United States should not engage in any coordinated attempt to increase global taxes on economic activity. …The United States would be better off rejecting the proposal to raise taxes on the global economy, and instead focus on fixing our domestic tax code by substantially lowering our corporate tax rate.

By the way, don’t forget that BEPS is just one of the bad anti-tax competition schemes being advanced by the bureaucrats in Paris.

David Burton of the Heritage Foundation has just produced a new study on the OECD’s Multilateral Convention, which would result in an Orwellian nightmare of massive data collection and promiscuous data sharing.

Read the whole thing if you want to be depressed, but this excerpt from his abstract tells you everything you need to know.

The Protocol amending the Multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters will lead to substantially more transnational identity theft, crime, industrial espionage, financial fraud, and the suppression of political opponents and religious or ethnic minorities by authoritarian and corrupt governments. It puts Americans’ private financial information at risk. The risk is highest for American businesses involved in international commerce. The Protocol is part of a contemplated new and extraordinarily complex international tax information sharing regime involving two international agreements and two Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) intergovernmental initiatives. It will result in the automatic sharing of bulk taxpayer information among governments worldwide, including many that are hostile to the United States, corrupt, or have inadequate data safeguards.